When disaster strikes, what will be your “disaster personality”? I don’t know if I think about this question more than the normal person or not, but I’ve given it fair consideration since my teens years. Simply put, I’m interested in knowing how I would react to being tested by whatever disaster scenario may occur, most consistently throughout my life, of course, being a school shooting (that isn’t to say that was ever most likely, just most salient in my head when my mind squirreled in school because in actuality, the most likely way I would encounter a “disaster” is a via a motor vehicle crash). Paralysis or heroism? Or something in between? Freezing in the face of disaster is not always the wrong response — that adaptive evolutionary response could be life-saving, as one survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting found, still the deadliest school shooting in American history — and heroism is relatively poorly understood, and also, seems to contradict adaptive evolution, i.e., it ought to be a human trait killed off by evolution. Time reporter Amanda Ripley, explores the fascinating, understudied human response to disasters, be they shootings, floods, plane crashes, or terrorism, like 9/11, in her 2008 book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — And Why. This was such an interesting, revealing book that both reassured me about the capacity for human goodness and scared the crap out of me about driving a vehicle again. (In a all seriousness, Ripley makes an incredibly potent point that vehicle crashes in the U.S. are obviously preventable, and that part of prevention means better training for young drivers, but driver’s education isn’t as well-inundated in our culture as it ought to be, or even specifically training people on their vehicles, like the difference between a SUV and a Honda, or training them specifically in a simulation-like way on how to deal with skidding on a road. Most revelatory about Ripley’s point on driving is something I didn’t know: the number of traffic fatalities attributed to the post-9/11 fear of flying — about as many, or more, than died on 9/11 itself.)
There are three stages to the survivor arc when faced with disaster: denial, deliberation, and the decisive moment. Not that these are necessarily linear, Ripley says, but to survive a disaster involves going through some machination of these three stages (often more than once). She uses Elia Zedeño as a case study in denial, which is another way of saying delay. In 1993, Zedeño was in the World Trade Center when it was bombed in the parking garage. In 2001, she was still working in the World Trade Center when 9/11 occurred. Her response, which is actually the common response to fires and disasters, was to do … nothing. She was in the denial phase. Particularly for her, certainly some level of, “I can’t believe this is happening again.” Before proceeding down the stairs, she stopped to grab a mystery novel on her desk. Human behavior in incredibly rare, disastrous moments is so compelling to examine, whether Zedeño’s individually or human behavior as a collective. Popular imagination and culture tends to think when disaster strikes, humans return to their base survival instincts and become animals, where it’s survival of the fittest. But in fact, like on 9/11 and many other disaster scenarios Ripley outlines, humans actually operate calmly, orderly, and graciously in helping others. 9/11 is replete with those kinds of stories, big and small. In disasters, we look toward one another in what Ripley calls “social milling” to see what to do, and while this can sometimes lead to a fatal delay in acting, it can also be the mechanism for our survival. As for the other two parts of the arc, deliberation and the decisive moment are often a result of preparedness, which is why Ripley leans on U.S. Special Forces, for example, to understand why they react the way they do to exceptional circumstances.
Ripley’s thesis stems from a frustration with how we think about and respond to disasters. Her thesis is that regular people are the most important people on the frontlines of disaster and that we should better prepare and train regular people than we do. Emergency plans don’t account well enough for regular people. Regular people get overlooked, primarily because authorities don’t trust people to behave correctly when disaster strikes. But more information is key to survival! Preparing our brain in the event of disaster can help override certain evolutionary brain responses, like delaying and freezing. Instead, often after disasters, like 9/11, or any other disaster for that matter, we tend to do two things in an effort to be better prepared next time something disastrous should occur: a.) we give more training and money to first responders since we obviously imagine them as those who will be responding to the disaster; and b.) we fortify “soft targets” and hope technology and engineering can offset death tolls. For example, after the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing, Ripley said they put up these gigantic barriers around the parking area, which obviously, were useless when a commercial airliner struck the building. In other words, people still weren’t properly trained on how the heck to get out of the buildings in the event of a fire. Or after 9/11, we implemented (supposedly better) security checkpoints at airports with the creation of the Transportation Security Administration to prevent weapons, like the boxcutters the 9/11 terrorists used, and we fortified the cockpit, so the plane couldn’t be as easily hijacked in that manner, but Ripley argues, we still don’t properly train passengers on how to survive plane crashes and fires. That training is crucial when you’re talking about the difference seconds can make to one’s survival. I know I’m going to pay more attention to the safety manual and training next time I fly, as she literally points out how that makes a difference in survival.
One of the more interesting phenomena that occurs during disaster is the sensation of time distortion. Survivors of police shootings, plane crashes, shipwrecks, and so on, often report that it seemed as if time slowed down. But from a scientific standpoint, it appears more likely that time distortion during trauma is more within the memory than in reality. Ripley could have written an entire follow-up book about the dynamic of memory and how we process trauma, disasters, and surviving, and what that correspondingly means for our narratives around such events.
Ripley also gets at something particularly revealing in places like the U.S., where we are rich enough that our “personal makeup can be more important than the facts of the disaster.” In other words, that’s why a similar magnitude earthquake that killed only 63 people in California, killed 100,000 in Pakistan. The money difference also explains the counterintuitive fact that while natural disasters have increased, their severity in developed countries, such as the U.S., has not (their monetary cost certainly has, though, obviously).
While Ripley does devote some time to panic, primarily the experience of those making the pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj, where thousands have died since 1990 in crowd crushes (horrifying to consider, and most die of asphyxiation, not necessarily being stepped on or the like), she is right to note that the most pervasive response to disaster is not panic, but doing nothing. Freezing or being paralysed, an adaptive evolutionary response (a lion won’t eat “food” that isn’t struggling for fear it’s tainted, and so, as a response, prey sometimes “play dead”), is different from panicking. She notes, “The fear of panic may be more dangerous than panic itself.” That’s because of the aforementioned thesis that emergency response planners discount the importance of regular people for fear of inducing panic. For the record, with respect to crowd crushes situations like the Hajj, Ripley argues that’s not necessarily an issue with “bad human behavior,” but rather, bad physics and planning. Better planning around the pilgrimage and spatial construction, as it were, will prevent crowd crushing situations from arising. See, for an example, Ripley says, the throngs of people who descend upon New York City’s Times Square for New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop each year without incident. That’s due to better planning and crowd control.
To put Ripley’s thesis in a more blunt way, which is to say, the implication of her thesis (the failure to better equip regular people for disaster), comes from one of the experts she interviewed, “Americans die because someone thought they would panic if they gave them a warning.” Give us a warning! Perhaps there is also another factor working against this beyond the concern about people panicking. Authorities also think people won’t heed warnings or take them seriously, so better to just leave it to the first responders. But that’s narrowing the scope of potential survivors!
As for heroes, it’s possible evolutionary, the answer is, “If I’m a hero, that’ll make me more desirable to the opposite sex, so we can procreate,” which Ripley acknowledges may take the sheen off of heroics, it explains some of the heroism, at least from a subconscious, evolutionary standpoint. But it still feels like some of that story is fundamentally missing. Roger Olian, the man she profiles toward the end who jumped into the frozen Potomac to save survivors of a plane crash, what did he get out of it? She asks him, and for Olian, he thinks (and again, this is where memory maps onto action in retrospect) he acted because to not act would be disappointing himself. Perhaps that still distorts the act into counterintuitively a “selfish” act. I wonder what Ripley, or researchers, would say about people, like myself, who have donated their kidneys to strangers. What did I get out of it exactly? I can’t even say much thought was put into it. But if there was any close approximation, then it would be similar to Olian’s. To not disappoint myself for not doing enough to help others when I had the knowledge of being capable of doing so.
Ripley’s book is a must-read deep dive into our brain, human behavior, both individual and collectively, and a clarion call for authorities to be better at equipping regular people with the training and know-how to survive disaster, should it ever come. I just hope I’ll at least turn the wheel into the skid.
Milam's Musings 